How to Choose a Color Scheme

Have you ever stood in front of a wall of paint chips, stunned by how many choices you have for the wall colors for your home? If so, you’re not alone. Choosing a color palette for a room in your home or cabin can seem insurmountable when you first start out. For cabins, certain color schemes work better than others, since natural colors are a much more appropriate fit. Even so, the vast array of colors to choose from makes selecting a color palette difficult even for a cabin.

Here are a few tips from HGTV.com for choosing a color scheme. Among other pointers, they offer this advice:

• Pull colors from the largest pattern in your room to create a color scheme. If you already have your big furniture pieces or a favorite rug chosen, use some of those colors in the rest of the room.
• For a casual, relaxing room, choose colors that are close together on the color wheel. Join greens with blues, for example.
• Use colors from light to dark vertically. That means light colored ceilings, a medium-toned wall color, and dark flooring.
• If you include something black in every room, even if it’s a small item, it will set off the other colors in the room beautifully.

A lot of paint chips offer a sampling of complementary colors on the backs. So you can just pick up a paint chip in a color you like and use the colors on the back as a guideline for the rest of the room.

Greens make a wonderful addition to cabins and log homes, since they fit the surrounding environment so well, and browns work especially well with green. Fortunately, there’s plenty of rustic furniture and rugs out there that have those beautifully nature-inspired colors and designs. What colors have you chosen for your cabin?